10 great political thrillers

Unlike, say, a musical or a western, a political thriller isn’t always immediately or easily identifiable as such – appropriate, given the genre deals in slippery figures and complex plots. Typically, a political thriller will concern itself with the (often shady) nature of a state; the story will likely be based on real events or will at least have strong real-world political resonance; and, at the heart of it, there will almost definitely be a conspiracy or an injustice done by the powerful to those less so.

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent certainly ticks all of those boxes. In Filho’s latest, which is on release in the UK this February, a former academic (Wagner Moura) goes on the run in 1970s Brazil, attempting to stay out of the reach of villains with ties to the military regime.

The latter-day work of Kathryn Bigelow also fits the broad definition of a political thriller. Through her last three films, Bigelow – whose work is currently showing at BFI Southbank as part of the season Close to the Edge: The Films of Kathryn Bigelow – has interrogated America’s use of force domestically and abroad, considering with Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Detroit (2017) and A House of Dynamite (2025) whether the US, in the name of security, systemically errs towards doing harm.

The Secret Agent, Bigelow’s recent films and the work of filmmakers who have informed our very notion of the political thriller, such as Alan J. Pakula and Costa-Gavras, altogether say this: if it thrills and the plot involves individuals coming up against systems more powerful than they, it’s probably a political thriller.

Filmmakers have approached the genre in a number of ways, however, while sometimes sprinkling in other genre elements like horror, film noir and even comedy. Meanwhile, there has been more than enough political discord and misuse of power throughout history to have inspired political thrillers from and about nations the world over.

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

The Hitchcock filmography is flush with political thrillers, though the Master of Suspense was always less interested in the actual politics than the winding, location-hopping mystery plot that a spot of political intrigue could offer him. Case in point: Foreign Correspondent, in which Joel McCrea’s reporter, John Jones – one of Hitch’s everyday men plunged into an extraordinary situation – finds himself inadvertently at the centre of a fascist plot in a Europe on the edge of war.

Made after World War II had already begun but before the US had joined the fight, Foreign Correspondent is a rare Hitchcock political thriller to carry something like a political message; Jones literally delivers one to an audience of American radio listeners in one scene, urging the US to get battle-ready as Nazi bombers commence blitzing London. But this being Hitch, the pleasure of the film is in the set pieces, from perils involving a Dutch windmill to the mid-Atlantic crash landing of a passenger plane, astonishingly realised entirely on a sound stage.

Director: John Frankenheimer

Released in the US in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis, The Manchurian Candidate could almost be the fever dream of someone living through that five-alarm moment in the Cold War: brainwashed by Soviet and Chinese forces in the Korean War, veteran Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), once back on home soil, is activated by communists inside the US, his mission to kill political targets and ultimately engender a communist takeover of America.

Reds under the bed, mind control, collapse of the post-WWII order… The Manchurian Candidate takes the choicest Western hysterias of the age and filters them through hallucinatory, at-times nightmarish noir images. As it processes those contemporary anxieties, John Frankenheimer’s film also looks prophetically ahead, not just to a wave of politically motivated assassinations to come in the US, but also to an American cinema that would take a more generally cynical view of US politics in the New Hollywood era.

Director: Gillo Pontecorvo

A war film through a decidedly political lens, Gillo Pontecorvo’s dramatisation of the eponymous year-long struggle in the Algerian War of Independence stirringly realises the close-quarters action while also detailing the conditions and ideologies that fuelled the conflict. Through persecution by the ruling French colonial government, Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj) is radicalised from petty street criminal to soldier of the National Liberation Front, as French forces – led by WWII Resistance hero Colonel Mathieu (Jean Martin) – meet Algerian guerrilla and terror tactics with sheer military might.

A cultural and stylistic melange, The Battle of Algiers was shot on location in Algiers with largely non-professional actors (including some veterans of the revolution) in Italian neorealist fashion, photographed in the unprocessed documentary style of direct cinema, and scored by Pontecorvo and Ennio Morricone as a blend of military march and tragic opera – disparate influences that altogether serve to give the film an anxious immediacy equalled by few other war pictures.

Director: Costa-Gavras

“Any resemblance to real events or to people living or dead is not coincidental. It is intentional.” As Z’s defiant opening text suggests, director Costa-Gavras is as concerned about disguising the identities of his subjects as he is about concealing his anger. A doyen of the political thriller, responsible for suspense pictures about injustices from Czechoslovakia to Chile, Costa-Gavras never harnessed his righteous indignation with more furious elan than he did for a story of rot in his homeland: that of the 1963 killing of leftist MP Grigoris Lambrakis (played as an unnamed ‘deputy’ in the film by Yves Montand) by agitators with ties to the Greek government.

Z’s pace only quickens once the investigation into the MP’s death begins, the film hardly stopping to breathe until, in a remarkable moment at the inquiry’s close, a verbal slip by Jean-Louis Trintignant’s strait-laced state investigator finally lays bare the government’s official story for the brazen charade that it is.

Director: Alan J. Pakula

As the social and political turbulence of America’s 1960s and 70s coincided with a counterculture sea change in Hollywood, anti-establishment sentiment and conspiratorial thinking both enjoyed a golden age in American cinema. The Parallax View – the middle chapter of Alan J. Pakula’s Paranoia trilogy (1971 to 1976) – is emblematic, a potboiler about a journalist’s (Warren Beatty) investigation into a murderous corporation that’s soaked in the suspicion and unease of the era.

Released in the year of Nixon’s resignation, and as the war in Vietnam dragged on, The Parallax View assumes corruption and brutality at the heart of the American project. Cinematographer Gordon ‘Prince of Darkness’ Willis drenches the film in shadow and dwarfs characters with overwhelming Riefenstahlian compositions, while Pakula and screenwriters David Giler and Lorenzo Semple Jr make allusions to the Kennedy assassinations, growing corporate power and shady US intelligence programmes such as MKUltra. All of it goes into the pot for what is the most delirious American political thriller of the period.

Director: Francesco Rosi

Made in a climate of political violence and extreme social and economic instability during Italy’s Years of Lead, Illustrious Corpses opens on images of mummified bodies inside a Palermo monastery, before opening up to reveal that decay and death have spread throughout the entire country. Against a backdrop of worn, rubbish-strewn streets and worker unrest – in one scene, a body is left at the crime scene because there’s an ambulance strike – Inspector Rogas (Lino Ventura) investigates a supposedly connected series of murders of members of the Italian judiciary.

Beginning as a straightforward police procedural, in the second half Illustrious Corpses, like Rogas, shifts away from attempting to uncover who is carrying out the killings as its hero slowly drowns in paranoia, his investigation having also apparently made him a target. Here the film takes on the air of almost cosmic horror, the threat seemingly everywhere and nowhere. Rogas is under constant surveillance, though his surveillants remain as unknowable as their plan.

Director: Neil Jordan

By the early 1990s, the violent tug-of-war for the soul of Northern Ireland by Unionists and Irish Republicans had lasted some 20-plus years, more than long enough for sides to become entrenched. In Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, IRA volunteer Fergus (Stephen Rea) goes to ground in London under a new identity following a botched execution, and there faces challenges to many of his former certainties, about the Troubles and more besides.

Through first developing an unexpected bond with captive British soldier Jody (Forest Whitaker), then finding romance with Jody’s sweetheart back home, Dil (Jaye Davidson), Fergus has much of what he understands to be true – about enemy and friend, attraction and gender, the nature of the self – challenged by Jordan’s intelligent (and famously twisty) screenplay. It’s as much a neo-noir as it is a political thriller, its shadow world inhabited by assassins, victims and femme fatales all rendered in shades of moral grey.

Director: Park Chan-wook

In the Joint Security Area of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a dead-of-night shootout leaves two killed, with two South Korean soldiers (Lee Byung-hun and Kim Tae-woo) and a North Korean sergeant (Song Kang-ho) surviving to tell conflicting versions of how peace was broken in the ‘Truce Village’. So far, so political thriller.

What’s unexpected about Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area is its early-in-the-game reveal of what’s behind the conspiracy, and that the secret is no greater than the survivors (along with one of the deceased) had for months been holding clandestine meetings as friends.

Flashbacks reveal a brotherly bond forged over booze and party games, while Park highlights the absurdities of the DMZ: soldiers North and South all day rigidly stand guard either side of the concrete Demarcation Line, before a South Korean patrol on night manoeuvres later casually passes over into North Korea by mistake. In Park’s film, all that’s keeping the soldiers apart seems to be the continuing fiction that there’s something dividing them.

Director: Olivier Assayas

Best seen in its five-and-a-half hour miniseries cut for the fullest sweep, Carlos recreates the days of post-WWII ‘world revolution’ – from its height in the febrile 70s through to its end following the fall of the Soviet Union – inside a biopic of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, alias Carlos the Jackal. Set over two decades, Carlos presents Sánchez (Édgar Ramírez) as a kind of malign Forrest Gump, at the centre of Cold War terrorist activity across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, working alongside everyone from Palestinian liberation groups to authoritarian regimes to leftist cells from West Germany to Japan.

Carlos’s early years are thrilling, with the slowly unravelling 1975 OPEC Siege a particularly tense highlight, but the film’s subject really comes into focus once his shrinking means of making revolutionary cash sees him start offering his services to the highest bidder. As played by Ramírez, from swaggering international anarchist to potbellied has-been, the Jackal is a self-important, vainglorious hollow man, his longevity – relative to that of the associates killed or caught along the way, at least – a result of his ultimately adjustable political convictions.

Director: Andreas Fontana

Much of what’s thrilling or indeed political about Azor is in the film’s margins, in what’s glimpsed or half-said. In the film’s junta-controlled Argentina circa 1980, characters speak as people must in an authoritarian state; it’s only through a slow drip of information whispered and intimated by clients and colleagues that visiting Swiss banker Yvan de Wiel (Fabrizio Rongione) can build a picture of what has happened to his missing business partner, Keys, who has disappeared after having seemingly become too comfortable in the country.

As an increasingly morally compromised Yvan hobnobs with the new Argentina’s ghoulish power players, some come close to saying outright what ugliness is happening under the military dictatorship (one rapacious priest talks of a “purification” to rid the nation of “parasites”). Otherwise, it’s implied in banalities, like the lists of household items and properties suddenly acquired in bulk for auction by junta men. Andreas Fontana keeps his film quiet and still; the horror is in what can’t be seen or heard.